Thursday, September 13, 2007

Talking about Maddy at the tea room


“She did it out of love,” Franck’s face is animated but serious.

His wife Louise, rolled her eyes. “He is asking what everyone thinks, today.”

I was at La Noisette, my home away from home. I spend lots of time sitting at tables like this, enjoying the sky, the church, the ambience eating everything from a full English breakfast to drinking a cup of tea. Although I often take my book, I seldom read, because I meet so many people and we get embroiled in conversation. All roads lead to La Noisette, one Englishman said, but it is true not just for the English, but the whole international community and the local community too.

Franck was talking about the Maddy case, the little girl who went missing in Portugal and her parents are now considered suspects. He mentioned the mother was a doctor, that she could have given her too much sleeping medicine before they went out to dinner, then shaken her too to wake her but killed her. He uses his hand to show shaking motions. According to Franck when she realised what she had done, they could have begun a cover-up to protect their remaining children, the reason it was done out of love.

He is sure she could have found a place to hide the body because police were looking elsewhere.

At this point Louise points out that the “nounou” the child’s stuffed animal was left. As a mother she knows anyone would take the nounou to keep the child quiet if she were alive. She also found it strange that the mother washed everything belonging to nounou.

I don’t know if the mother is guilty. I do know that Franck is a proud father, carrying two-year old Toby-toes around the village on his shoulders or playing with him after he comes to the tea room from the creche. If Louise accidentally (this is hard to write) killed their son, I can’t imagine there very strong couple surviving it, with or without media attention.

Another customer came in, and the facts of the case are reviewed again. Louise makes the suggestion that Franck might want to wait on the lunch crowd arriving, which he does.
I go back to the contemplation of the street feeling overwhelming sadness for the people who I never met or will never meet.

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